Various techniques are known for forming metal or other manufactured parts, such as “subtractive manufacturing” in which portions of a larger piece of material are removed to form a manufactured part. Subtractive manufacturing or material removal from a ductile material is a special type of operation with large localized deformations and can be modeled as a forming operation. Subtractive manufacturing operations often involve cutting operations (such as turning, milling, and boring operations) and other “forming” operations performed by computer numerical control (CNC) machines. A large subtractive manufacturing facility could include many CNC machines, which can consume enormous amounts of energy and require the use of large amounts of coolant for the CNC machines.
Some attempts have been made to model what happens to material during forming operations, but these approaches have generally been inadequate for various reasons. For example, finite element analysis (FEA) has been attempted to model the behavior of material during forming operations, but FEA approaches often require large amounts of computational resources and are very time-consuming. Eulerian and Arbitrary Lagrangian Eulerian (ALE) analyses can generate solutions using less computational resources but have other shortcomings, such as the inability to handle large localized material deformations or to track material interfaces.